


This Rabbit Heart

by epistolic



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 18:23:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m fairly certain I locked my door,” Will says.</p>
<p>“I’ve decided,” Beverly says, talking right over him, “that man cannot subsist on dog food alone.” She flings open his curtains. “So instead we will subsist on nachos. I hope your oven works.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Rabbit Heart

“Hey.”

Will comes awake with a jerk. It takes him some time to work out where he is – Wolf Trap? Minnesota? he could be dead for all he knows – he squints up painfully at the face leaning over the back of his couch.

“Jesus,” Beverly Katz says. “Those are the clothes you were wearing two days ago.”

She is staring at him unabashedly. Amusement curls her lip. Her hair is loose today, her make-up sparse, and she tosses something down on the cushions at his feet before turning away. The dogs scuffle – they are excited to have a visitor. Or perhaps they are just hungry.

Will pokes the plastic bag tentatively with a foot. It crackles. 

“I’m fairly certain I locked my door,” he says.

“I’ve decided,” Beverly says, talking right over him, “that man cannot subsist on dog food alone.” She flings open his curtains. “So instead we will subsist on nachos. I hope your oven works.”

Will bolts upright, shocked into action. “I’m sorry – _nachos?_ ”

“We can’t all be Hannibal Lecter. Oh, do you fish?”

“That’s a present,” Will says, testily. “Please don’t touch it. It’s very delicate.”

Beverly looks at him over her shoulder. He knows what she’s seeing: rumpled suit jacket, shirt soaked through with sweat, his hair in peaks all over his head. Barefoot. One shoe is under the coffee table; the other is somehow on the other side of the room.

“Wasn’t going to,” she says, and smiles at him. “God, you look awful.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. The salsa’s extra hot, by the way. You can deal with it, or you can deal with it. Your choice.”

He watches her move about the room. Her hands are stuck inside the pockets of her jeans, and her bare feet make no noise. He wants desperately to ask her to leave.

Instead, he bends over and peeks inside the plastic bag. “I don’t like tomatoes.”

“And I don’t like cheese. But I bought some anyway.” She grins. “We can do a half-and-half.”

The dogs follow them into the kitchen, getting tangled underfoot and shoving wet noses into the fabric of their pants. Will drifts, vaguely perplexed; Beverly opens and closes his cabinets, looking for an oven-safe something, the sunlight catching highlights in the smooth, silk black of her hair.

“Did Jack send you?” Will manages at last, watching helplessly from the kitchen door.

“Nope.”

“Hannibal?”

She looks at him, incredulous. “I’m not a Labrador, Will. I don’t get _sent_.”

The oven comes to life with a purr. Her back to him, she is humming a tune: he doesn’t recognise it. Her head nods in time to the same inner melody. 

“Damn,” she says after a while. “I knew I should’ve brought the cheese grater.”

\--

It is a week afterward. A Wednesday. Hotdog day, down at the staff cafeteria. She is struggling through the door of his lecture hall – thankfully empty – and her arms are full of files.

“Incoming,” Beverly says. 

This is all the warning he gets before she dumps them in a landslide over his desk.

His coffee sloshes everywhere. They both see this happen in their peripheral vision; Beverly first, because her reflexes are faster. Then she laughs – a surprised laugh, as loud and as bright as brass. “Oops. Sorry. That’s what you get for not helping me carry them from the car. You have any tissues in that desk of yours?”

Will fumbles for them, wordless.

“Though to be honest,” she says, taking them from his hand, “I was secretly hoping to get some on your clothes. Maybe force you to change them once in a while.”

“I change them,” Will says quickly. It comes out very defensive.

“Sure. These are an early Christmas present from Jack, by the way.”

“I’m preparing for a lecture I have to give in an hour.”

Beverly flourishes a wet tissue at him. “Jesus, I didn’t say you had to get through all of them now. Some light bedtime reading, maybe. Send you off to sleep faster.” She picks up the coffee cup to clean under it, then in the same movement raises it up to her nose. She gives it a quick sniff. “Wow, this is terrible.”

Will sits there quietly and doesn’t say anything.

Beverly watches him. Then, slowly, she sets the cup back down in its saucer.

“Sorry,” she says. “I know you’re busy. I just wanted to get these to you express by courier.”

“No, it isn’t,” Will begins. Then he shuts up. For a lack of something to do, he reaches out and takes the top file off the stack. He flips it open: directs his words to the paper and the ink. “Thank-you.”

“Not a problem. I love being treated like the resident mailman.”

Will can feel his ears getting hot. “I don’t mind picking them up from Jack myself next time.”

Then he sees that she’s wearing her customary grin. Beverly is always doing this to him, he realises. Making little trapdoors that he keeps stepping on, little rabbit-holes, and the next thing he knows he’s fallen through the floor.

“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed,” Beverly tells him, like this is important information.

“Uh,” Will says. “Uh, about this file – ”

“Don’t read it yet,” she says. She turns for the door; the zip of her jacket brushes the surface of his desk. “Lecture in an hour, remember? Don’t forget your prep.”

He feels a strange impulse to reach out. To call her back.

He sits on it instead, like a guilty child caught thieving might sit on his hands.

\--

He’s wary of her after that, for no discernible reason.

At crime scenes he finds he can’t meet her eye. Not that he could meet her eye to begin with. But now, it’s even worse. He skirts her physical space with a radius of several metres. When she speaks, he falls into a sullen silence that takes him minutes to recover from; he finds himself aware at all times of where she is standing, of whom she is speaking to, the angles of her body and the force of her attention turned this way or that.

Jack notices. Jack doesn’t approve, and doesn’t hesitate to say so. 

“Will,” Jack says, “is everything alright?”

“Everything’s fine. There’s a dead woman on the floor, but apart from that, everything’s just excellent.”

He can feel Beverly’s attention swivelling over to him; it makes things worse.

Jack opens his mouth to give him a firm talking-to.

“I’m sorry,” Will says before Jack has a chance to get out a single word. “It’s just – it’s very hot in here, and I can’t think. There are too many people. Everyone’s talking too much. Can we – can I have some time here alone?”

“Will,” Jack says.

“Won’t be more than a few minutes,” Will says. “Please.”

Jack watches him. This is the thing about Jack – he knows when he’s being spun a line. When he’s being fed bullshit. For a second Will thinks he’s going to argue, but then Jack turns away.

“Everybody,” Jack roars, like a sergeant major. His heavy boots clip the tiled floor. “Everybody, _out_!”

Will is swiftly developing a headache.

Beverly Katz is a slender shape against the dead woman’s fireplace. Unlike the other people in the room she doesn’t duck her head; her chin is held high, her dark eyes bright. When she files past him she bridges the gap in the air – one hand, casual, landing like a bird on his shoulder, there and gone.

“Don’t get stuck down there,” she says. “Or you might catch this guy’s crazy.”

By the time he’s worked out a reply, she’s already gone.

\--

The artificial lighting of the lab washes her out. She is not very attractive here, out of the sun, bent half over a specimen with her blue nitrile gloves, her splash-proof goggles.

Will hovers uncertainly near the door. “Hey.”

“Can’t talk, busy,” Beverly says, in a tone like an answering machine.

“Oh,” Will says.

He hadn’t come in to talk. In fact, he’s not even in the lab, strictly speaking. 

Beverly Katz is a study in concentration. She looks poised, the sleek cogs of her mind turning underneath her regulation hairnet. The air barely stirs in the room.

Then abruptly she looks up. She catches sight of him. Her mouth, generously large, with a propensity to turn up at the corners even when she isn’t really smiling, breaks into a grin. Gone is the Beverly who shot a woman from the bushes, the bullet ten scant centimetres from the head of a child; gone is the Beverly who didn’t flinch at a severed arm, at men and women with their backs flayed off, at a family massacre.

“Oh, it’s you,” Beverly says. “For some reason I thought it was Brian. You couldn’t get him to shut up even if you taped his mouth shut. What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d drop in,” Will says.

She raises a brow. “Drop in?”

“To take a look at Patton. You know. Before we send her off to the morgue.”

“We already sent her off to the morgue,” Beverly says. “Just this morning. You missed her by about three hours. But I took pretty comprehensive notes, and you didn’t say that you wanted to keep her, so – ”

“It’s – fine,” Will says.

He’s already backing out of the room with a vague sense of alarm: retreat, retreat, retreat.

“Hey,” Beverly says, looking surprised. “Where are you going? Do you want my notes or not?”

“Email them to me,” Will says. He feels panicked all of a sudden – there’s an expression on Beverly’s face he is unwilling to interpret. “I’ll read them tonight.”

For a second it seems like she’s going to follow him out of the lab. He can see her contemplating it. But then she seems to remember: lab coat, gloves, goggles – they’re meant to be fog-proof but they damn well never are – the blood on her hands.

“Okay,” Beverly says and nods. “Email, then.”

\--

“You’re afraid,” Hannibal says, leaning forward attentively with his elbows on his knees.

It’s a kinder way of saying what Will already knows: _You’re a coward._

“Yeah,” Will Graham says.

\--

This has never happened to Will before, but then nobody has ever treated Will like a human being before.

People don’t admit it but he can tell. He can read it in their bodies. Something about him frightens them in a deep, nameless way. Perhaps they see something in him they would rather not understand; he is a walking, talking reminder of how close the minds of murderers can be to ours. How fine the line really is, between monster and man.

Beverly Katz is different. Beverly Katz doesn’t give a damn.

He’s filched the file of her sister from the Records department. It had been a seamless thievery, a gift from the mind of someone else – he knows all manner of things he would rather not know: how to gut a dog, how to strangle from behind, how to break the ribs with bolt-cutters to get at the heart.

Leah Katz was sixteen when she killed her parents, her grandparents, her cat, and then tried to kill her sister.

There is a thin scar over Beverly’s collarbone that Will has never seen. He traces the photograph of it in the file with a fingertip; the white line on her skin is as sharp as the edge of a filleting knife.

Beverly Katz, he thinks, understands.

\--

“Are you _avoiding_ me, Will Graham?”

She’s managed to catch him at the door to the cafeteria. Normally he doesn’t come here – people, as a general rule, are obstacles he does his best to avoid – but Hannibal is at a conference over in Europe and his fridge looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie.

People file past them slowly, curious. Their eyes jump from Beverly’s face to his.

“No,” Will says. He clears his throat: he doesn’t like lying. “No, I’ve just been – busy.”

“Did you get my email?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Your notes are very comprehensive,” he says. 

He is trying surreptitiously to edge past her. It’s her directness that frightens him, the fact she isn’t afraid of making a scene in front of all their colleagues. 

She stops him with a neat step sideways. “Will, I need to know what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on. I’m working. Teaching. There are a lot of papers to mark, and then there’s – ”

“I don’t care about how you feel towards me,” Beverly cuts in. “Maybe I pushed too fast, maybe I took a step out of line. That’s fine. Maybe nothing’s going to come of it, and that’s fine too. Whatever you like. But I’m your colleague, Will, and if we’re going to catch the bastard who killed those women we need to pull at the yoke together, do you understand? And that’s not going to happen if you keep skirting the lab and the people inside it like it’s the plague.”

“I’m not – I went to the lab just last week, remember?”

“Yeah,” Beverly says, sarcastic. “And then you ran away. I’ve still got Ilkes wrapped up and waiting for you to inspect, but you haven’t come in once since we found her.”

“I trust your notes.”

“You never trusted them before. And don’t bullshit me, you can’t even read my handwriting.”

This is unfortunately true. All the empathy in the world hadn’t helped Will with that. He chooses a spot somewhere to the right of Beverly’s temple, looks nervously at that instead of meeting her eye.

“I’m willing to adapt,” Beverly says. “If I’m the problem, I can step out of the lab whenever you decide to drop in and take a look at things.”

“You’re not the problem.”

Beverly sounds impatient. “Yes, I know. _You’re_ the problem. I only said it to be polite.”

“I’ll take a look at Ilkes after lunch,” he says.

“Good.”

He had thought that would be the end of the conversation – but apparently not. She is still there, arms folded, dark eyes unimpressed, waiting for something. She has a faint chemical smell from the lab. The goggles have left two small indents on the bridge of her nose.

He realises for the first time that, underneath the formaldehyde, she smells like warm cotton.

“You still haven’t told me what the matter is,” she says finally. “You’ve been weird this past week or so.”

“This is how I’ve always been,” Will mutters.

“Would it help if I wore heels? Curled my hair? Wore skirts instead of pants? Sat waiting in the laboratory for you to bring me roses and ask for my number?”

“I – what?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Her eyes soften, her lips twitching. “I know you’re not that type. And hell, I’m not that type either. This is the way I am, Will, take it or leave it. If you want me to back off, I’ll back off. But I’ve never been the type to wait around for what I want. I go after it.”

He chances a look at her face. “Yes, I know.”

“Alright. Good. So do you want me to back off or not?”

Beverly, with her sure-fire aim and her inelegant laughter. Beverly, with all her family dead in the ground. He thinks about her that day in his kitchen, her narrow hips swaying gently as she hummed, tipping sour cream onto a plate of corn chips. 

“No,” he says. He surprises himself: his voice doesn’t tremble. “I don’t want you to back off.”

“Good.” She laughs. Instantly, all the tension goes out of her face; she beams. “Great. It’s a relief actually, I’ve been coming here every day trying to run into you, and I’m allergic to half the stuff they make.”

“I didn’t know you had allergies.”

“That’s because they’re not real allergies. I just don’t like them. It’s an _expression_.” Beverly takes his wrist without an ounce of hesitation, already turning to tug him after her. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

She is a bright point in the landscape: a spot of colour on monochrome, like a comet. 

He puts his fear behind him and he follows.

\--

He still has no idea of what he wants, even less of an idea of what he deserves; but this, he has. 

**Author's Note:**

> This pairing, guys, _this pairing_. I just can't get Beverly Katz out of my head, she is so badass and awesome. All the women in this show are awesome! Even Freddie is awesome in her own way. If this show does get cancelled I am going to be so sad :(
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
